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Hayabusa 2 - Japan's sample return probe to asteroid 1999 JU3

The mission will take off on top of an H-2A launcher as soon as December, fly to an asteroid scientists believe is a relic from the genesis of the solar system, drop a European-built lander, and return to Earth in 2020 with extraterrestrial rock samples.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency revealed Hayabusa 2 to media Sunday as it neared the finish line in a four-year effort to design, construct and test the spacecraft.

No, the best that can be said is that she made it back home, and fulfilled her mission of returning asteroid dust! But I sure wish Hayabusa 2 a less... complicated trip.

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On October 3rd, 2014, the University of Arizona (UA) hosted representatives of the Hayabusa-2 asteroid sample return mission to explore opportunities for collaboration with the OSIRIS-REx team. Following an invitation from UA President Ann Weaver Hart, a team led by Dr. Saku Tsuneta, Director General of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), visited the UA. The meeting included Dr. Masaki Fujimoto, ISAS director of solar system exploration, as well as Dr. Shogo Tachibana and Dr. Harold Connolly, the scientists who oversee the sample analysis plans for Hayabusa-2 and OSIRIS-REx, respectively.

There were three mini-satellites onboard the same launch vehicle. ARTSAT has posted to its Facebook page that they are receiving telemetry. I don't currently have information on PROCYON or Shin-en deployments -- I'll keep looking and update this when I find it.

In the time between launch and departure, I whiled away the time on Twitter, enjoying the excitement about Hayabusa 2. I particularly enjoy the way that enthusiasm for space exploration manifests itself in Japanese popular culture. Here are just a few of the great space-fan-produced creative responses to Hayabusa 2 that I saw last night:

More exciting than the three mini-satellites are the three mini-LANDERS on board. There are three Minerva 2 landers, designed to hop around the asteroid's surface. The original Hayabusa had just one Minerva, and it unfortunately never made it to the surface of Itokawa.

NASA and JAXA are cooperating on the science of the mission and NASA will receive a portion of the Hayabusa2 sample in exchange for providing Deep Space Network communications and navigation support for the mission.

Hayabusa2 builds on lessons learned from JAXA’s initial Hayabusa mission, which collected samples from a small asteroid named Itokawa and returned them to Earth in June 2010. Hayabusa2’s target is a 750 meter- wide asteroid named 1999 JU3, because of the year when it was discovered by the NASA-sponsored Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project, Lexington, Massachusetts. This is a C-type asteroid which are thought to contain more organic material than other asteroids. Scientists hope to better understand how the solar system evolved by studying samples from these asteroids.

“We think of C-type asteroids as being less altered than others,” says Lucy McFadden, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Bringing that material back and being able to look at it in the lab — I think it’s going to be very exciting.”

In June 2010, asteroid explorer Hayabusa completed a seven-year journey of about 6 billion kilometers, returning to Earth with dust particles from an asteroid. Its successor, Hayabusa2, was launched on an H-IIA Launch Vehicle from the Tanegashima Space Center on December 3, 2014. Hayabusa2 will make its own journey to asteroid 1999 JU3, carrying our hopes into outer space. Just before launch, we asked Project Manager Hitoshi Kuninaka to talk about the mission.

Three months into an interplanetary cruise expected to last three-and-a-half years, Japan’s $300 million Hayabusa 2 mission is in good health as it begins an ion-powered pursuit of an asteroid to return a piece of it to Earth.

The robotic spacecraft is already traveling more than 20 million miles from Earth after launching Dec. 3, and Japanese officials say the probe has passed health checks and is ready for the long-distance journey ahead.

The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft “completed its initial functional confirmation period on March 2, 2015, as all scheduled checkout and evaluation of acquired data were completed,” the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said in a statement. “The explorer has been under inspection for about three months after its launch on Dec. 3, 2014.”

The probe carries four ion thrusters to nudge it on course toward asteroid 1999 JU3, a carbon-rich world just 900 meters — about 3,000 feet — across with a tenuous gravity field 60,000 times weaker than Earth’s.

ESA is set to support Japan's 'touch-and-go' Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, now en route to a little-known asteroid, helping to boost the scientific return from this audacious mission. A flawless launch last December marked the start of a six-year round-trip for Japan's Hayabusa-2, which is on course to arrive at the carbon-rich asteroid 1999 JU3 in June 2018.

PROCYON (PRoximate Object Close flYby with Optical Navigation) is a microsatellite that launched on December 3 as a secondary payload with Hayabusa 2. The mission has now selected their asteroid flyby target -- a binary asteroid named 2000 DP107 -- but is reporting a problem with their ion engines.

JAXA is offering the opportunity to name Hayabusa2's target asteroid, 1999 JU3 to the public through a contest that runs through August 31. There are few conditions on the application process except the standard ones imposed by the IAU:

no more than 16 characters long (including any spaces or punctuation);
preferably one word;
pronounceable (in some language);
written using Latin characters (transliterations of names from languages not written using Latin characters are acceptable);
non-offensive;
not identical with or even too similar to an existing name of a minor planet or natural planetary satellite.

JAXA announced today the results of the naming contest for Hayabusa2. The target of the sample-return mission, formerly known as 1999 JU3 and still numbered 162173, is now named 162173 Ryugu.

Asteroid 1999 JU3, a target of the Asteroid Explorer “Hayabusa2,” was named “Ryugu”. One major reason for the selection was that, in the Japanese ancient story “Urashima Taro”, the main character, Taro Urashima, brought back a casket from the Dragon’s palace, or the “Ryugu” Castle, at the bottom of the ocean, and the theme of “bringing back a treasure” is common as the Hayabusa2 will also bring back a capsule with samples. It was selected among 7,336 entries. Thank you very much to so many of you who took part in the naming campaign.